Across the Atlantic: Modernizing the Digital Landscape with Workplace and G Suite at Air Caraïbes

AirCaraïbes is a prime example of how an integrated, multi-cloud solution is the key to transforming your digital landscape.

A regional airline of the French Caribbean, French airline Air Caraïbes operates long haul flights from Paris to the Caribbean and regional flights between the islands. The company employs over 1,200 people, over half of whom are cabin crew members, and transports around 1.6 million passengers per year.

With one main office in Guadeloupe and the other located in Orly, France, for years the airline was polarized, with management functions and communications split as if between two separate entities. As both poles of the organization continue to grow, the company wanted to bring together employees from both sides of the Atlantic under a single Air Caraïbes banner. The vehicle: an adapted combination of Workplace by Facebook, G Suite, and Playengo. The result: complete digital transformation.

The challenge: make two become one

“Sometimes our communication problems suggest that we are two separate companies,” Air Caraïbes IT Director Yoann Paulin explained that coordinating communications between Guadeloupe and Orly was becoming increasingly cumbersome. With the installation of a crew room where flight attendants wait to prepare their flight, these crew members no longer had direct contact with departmental functions. “We wanted to make sure they continued to be heard, and feel connected to the company.” When the company learned about Workplace, the choice was simple.

Reaching deskless workers with Workplace

Flight attendants constitute 700 out of the 1200 employees company wide at Air Caraïbes. This means almost 60% of staff is deskless, with access only to either a personal mobile device or a corporate iPad. Workplace was a natural solution for the familiar appeal of its mobile application:

“A lot of our population also use Facebook personally and were familiar with many of its functionalities. This meant we didn’t have to invest [so much] time in training, which would have been difficult to manage with a population that spends most of their time in the air!”

Revevol, as one of Facebook’s trusted partners, has been deploying Workplace among deskless populations since the launch of the platform in 2016, including names like Consolis and Kiloutou, with adoption rates consistently reaching over 80%. Our teams were able to create the right groups on Workplace for Air Caraïbes in order to connect their employees and encourage engagement.

The catalyst: change management with Revevol

Revevol’s change management team works with leaders from each department of your company to imagine and define the best use cases possible to optimize your Workplace investment. Air Caraïbes was no exception. Revevol provided a series of workshops which helped build and implement the proper training and adoption strategy for each of Air Caraïbes’ employee populations, be they flight attendants or corporate functions.

We work with your teams to create customized, non-intrusive training modules, whether for Champions, directors, or end-users, that adapt to your schedules and needs:

“[Revevol was] very flexible, as we had to fit in training for Champions and do live events around our busy summer schedule. They prepared the platform for us and set up the different Workplace groups.”

Revevol helped ensure a seamless deployment across the two different office groups, starting the project with Air Caraïbes Atlantique and integrating the remaining Air Caraïbes population for a joint go live. “This strategy helped us reach a critical mass very quickly,” Paulin explained. “Revevol knows how to adapt their strategy to fit with the constraints of our activity”

The result was stark success: today, over 95% of the flight attendants use Workplace on a weekly basis and over 80% of the ground staff also use the platform. Air Caraïbes IT Director explained that not only does the platform allow for higher-ups to communicate easily with employees, but it also allows employees to communicate with one another, and with corporate functions. “The heightened transparency has fluidified our communication and has contributed to our two companies getting closer, despite the Atlantic!”

Revevol is also working with Air Caraïbes on the deployment of Workplace chat bots to further help teams plan their flights, holidays, and automate other processes.

Workplace and G Suite: better together

Air Caraïbes had piloted G Suite prior to deployment of Workplace, with about 100 users already on the platform. Surfing on Workplace’s wave of success, the company decided to launch G Suite company wide, with Revevol as the partner. Not only is G Suite perfectly integrated with Workplace for accelerated deployment, but it has the advantage of being mobile-friendly, an added incentive for the airline’s large number of deskless workers. “We wanted to modernize our digital landscape and move towards a solution that would allow real time collaboration with the quick and efficient communication offered by Workplace.” G Suite was the perfect complement for the company’s already-booming adoption of Workplace.

Revevol’s cloud-based solutions are designed with integration in mind. Our cloud-based digital signage solution Playengo was built for seamless G Suite integration, and is perfectly compatible with Workplace. Air Caraïbes installed Playengo screens in crew rooms as a means to reach 100% of their flight attendant population, so that even users who don’t want to consult Workplace on their personal devices can still get up to date information thanks to threads displayed on screens. “This is a huge improvement from before when we could only send emails and didn’t know if [crew members] had received or read the information.”

Air Caraïbes serves as an example of a successful deployment for a three-part, integrated digital transformation strategy. As we learned at Revevol’s Cloud Landscape 2019 event, this is where success lies in today’s digital space. We should seek to avoid a monolithic vision of digital transformation and embrace tools that integrate and communicate with one another.